The Lumia 630, priced at $159 for a single-SIM version of the 3G handset and $169 for a dual-SIM variant, and the $189 Lumia 635 with 4G LTE, will slide into the lower-price segment of the smartphone market, Microsoft executive vice president Stephen Elop said at Microsoft's Build developer conference in San Francisco.

The larger Nokia Lumia 930, meanwhile, is stuffed to the gills with blazing fast hardware and will carry a significantly steeper price tag, starting at around $599 before carrier subsidies, Elop said.

Aside from the different modem options, the Lumia 630 and Lumia 635 are basically the same phone. Both feature a quad-core application processor, 4.5-inch ClearBlack screen, and five color options with changeable shells, including a new electric green that Elop gushed over during his presentation.

"There's more, with the new colors, these funky new smartphones are the first Lumias to see the Windows Phone navigation keys integrated into the user interface, disappearing when watching video and when the phones are locked, as well as slick volume buttons, matching the shell," Nokia said in a blog post.

The dual-SIM version of the Lumia 630 will be the first Lumia with that feature, while the Lumia 635 will instantly become "Nokia's best-value 4G smartphone ever," the company said.

The Lumia 630 and Lumia 635 sport a quad-core, 1.2GHz Snapdragon 400 processor from Qualcomm, 512MB of memory, and 8GB of onboard storage with additional microSD card support for 128GB, and feature a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. Better sensors, photo-editing options, and the ability to send photos directly to social media sites like Instagram have also been included in the Lumia 630 and Lumia 635, as well as in the Lumia 930, Nokia said.

The Nokia Lumia 630 will be released in Asian and European markets in May, with its debut in the United States undetermined for the time being, Elop said. The Lumia 635 will arrive in the U.S. and other world markets in July and AT&T, T-Mobile, and MetroPCS have already confirmed they'll be carrying it.

The Lumia 930, meanwhile, will soon be the prize horse in Nokia's stable, Elop said. This 5-inch, LTE-capable smartphone, which will come fully loaded with Windows Phone 8.1 at launch, has a 1,920-by-1,080-resolution Full HD display offering "a near 180-degree viewing angle for watching your content anywhere from bright sunny beaches to dimly lit hotel foyers," according to Nokia.

It packs Qualcomm's quad-core 2.2GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of memory, 32GB of internal storage plus 7GB of free Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage, and a big, honking 2420 mAh battery. What's more, Nokia has built wireless charging capabilities into the Lumia 930 to allow for topping up the battery with an accessory like the company's Fatboy wireless charging pillow.

The star of the show, though, may be the Lumia 930's 20-megapixel, rear-facing PureView camera featuring optical image stabilization (OIS) and Zeiss optics to "achieve pin-sharp shots and the flexibility to zoom into any shot after you've taken it," Nokia said. The imaging hardware is completed with an HD 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera.

The good news is that the Lumia 930 will be arriving in numerous global markets beginning in June and start appearing in even more throughout the summer. The bad news is that it doesn't look like this hero phone will make its way to the U.S. anytime soon, though Elop noted that Lumia Icon, already available here, is a pretty similar device.

Nokia will also be pushing out Windows Phone 8.1 to all Lumia phones in the coming months, he said. Elop touted Nokia's ability to offer a universal WP 8.1 upgrade for phones ranging from the value-priced Lumia 520 to the high-end Nokia Lumia 1520 as something that makers of Android phones aren't able to match.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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